Pretty Little Things - Jilliane Hoffman

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gonna be this hard all night. Molly was the conversationalist, not her.

      ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked as they pulled out of the lot and made a right on to Rock Island. ‘We can go to the food court at the mall, if you want.’ That would be perfect, she thought. There was a really big chance that she’d see someone from Ramblewood there. Maybe even Melissa or Erica.

      ‘Sounds good,’ he said softly.

      The creepy-sounding old guy started to rap on the radio. Vincent Price, the horror movie king from, like, a thousand years ago.

       Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand …

      ‘I really liked your picture,’ Zach said, but he didn’t look at her. She watched as a single drop of sweat trickled down the side of his neck, disappearing into his shirt.

      His arm was on the armrest, his hand dangling casually off the edge. Rough fingers tapped the gear shift. Wiry black hairs sprouted from the flesh above his knuckles. Lainey’s eyes slowly moved up his arm. Coarse black hairs stuck out of his cuff, like spindly spider legs.

      She suddenly felt incredibly cold. Prickly goosebumps raced across her flesh. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the car.

      Zach was blond.

       … And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver …

      He turned into an empty lot where a bunch of power station lines were. Across the street was a park. Molly’s mom had taken her and Molly there once before. It had a nature reserve running through it. The mall was in the other direction.

       For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller …

      She reached for the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The king of horror broke out into maniacal laughter. The song was over.

      The cloth came across her face with lightning speed even as the car was still moving. The wicked taste burned her eyes and closed her throat. It was hard to breathe. Then he punched her hard in the head. She felt her face smash against the glass. She felt the warm blood trickle from her forehead, running past her eye and down her cheek. She felt her hands fall to the floor, her legs twitch and just stop working, as everything went to black.

      The horror king just kept on laughing.

       9

      The hall clock started to chime. Debbie LaManna could hear it, even over the blare of the television. Even two rooms away. It chimed every quarter-hour, then dang in the number of hours at the top of every hour. It took five fucking minutes just to get through midnight. She cracked off a smoke ring. The ornate grandfather clock and a bank account with $3,714.22 in it was what her mother had left her nine years ago when she’d died of lung cancer, an oxygen tube strapped to her nose and a pack of Newports in hand. Of course the money was long gone, but damn it if that hideous Mack the Knife moon-face clock was still here – dragged along behind her from husband to husband, apartment to apartment, rental to rental. Toasting each lost hour of her life with a loud, distracting clang. One of these days she was gonna call the Salvation Army to come haul it away.

      Debbie counted as the dings hit eleven. Just to be sure, she looked at her watch. She was gonna kill Elaine. Really kill her. Who the hell did she think she was, staying out till eleven at night? She crushed out her cigarette. This was how it all started with Liza. Breaking curfew, coming home stoned. Smelling like a fucking bottle of Bud. If that kid thought for one second that she was gonna get away with half the shit her older sister had pulled, she had a cold, hard reality check coming. What was that saying her own mother used to love to say? Fool me once, shame on you, Debra. Fool me twice, shame on me. And Debbie was no fool. Not any more. Elaine Louise was so gonna have her ass handed to her when she walked through that door. That was for certain. She swallowed a big chug of her Mich Ultra and tried to concentrate on the news.

      ‘Is she home yet?’ Bradley called out from his bedroom down the hall. His voice had the twisted smirk of a kid who was happy that his sibling was gonna be in a shitload of trouble.

      ‘Brad, if you don’t close that damn door and go to sleep in the next five minutes, there is no Laser Tag tomorrow with Lyle. I can promise you that!’

      The door closed with a thud and Debbie tried to focus once again on the news. Listening to everyone else’s tragedies seemed to help for a little bit. A local fire. A bank robbery. Nine dead in an Iraq suicide bomb. Then her thoughts came around again. This time they landed on Todd, who was also not home yet. He was the real reason Debbie was so pissed off. Where the hell was he?

      An after-work beer with the boys, honey. Just unwinding from a long, hard day of making money to feed your kids.

      My ass, Debbie thought, bitterly. She knew he was probably drunk and fucking that new girl from the office in some sleazy Lauderhill motel or on a beach towel in the backseat of his car. The receptionist named Michelle that he swore up and down didn’t work at his office, even though that’s who’d answered the phone yesterday when Debbie had called to check.

      Debbie rubbed her throbbing temples and lit another cigarette. She looked around the family room, littered with crap the kids hadn’t cleaned up, including petrified cereal bowls leftover from breakfast, video games, clothes and stacks of crumpled school papers pulled out of book bags and thrown wherever. When Liza did feel like coming home, she loved to dump whatever she didn’t want to wear or carry anywhere she felt like it. And then there was the other prince in the house, Bradley. Thanks to his dad’s testosterone-fueled edict that housework was a woman’s job, he didn’t lift a finger to pick up his shit, either. After working another nine-hour shift, this is what Debbie got to come home to – a messy house, a rat-bastard husband, kids who drained every last bit of energy from her body. And of course, no respect. Now, after she’d just gotten through what she hoped was the worst with the oldest, Elaine was gonna try and give her patience a run for the money. She shook her head and slapped the newspaper off the couch. This was not how life was supposed to have turned out. On cue, her mother chimed in down the hall.

      Rosey, the kids’ Golden Retriever, walked in with a big bear stuffed in her mouth, and nuzzled her head on Debbie’s lap. Rosey stole every loose sock and stuffed animal in the house. This time it was Elaine’s ratty, old, teddy bear, Claude. She must have pulled it off Elaine’s bed. Lainey never went to sleep without him. She was thirteen going on thirty, maybe, but she still needed her teddy to go to sleep. Debbie pushed back the bad thoughts that kept trying to force their way into her head. She fingered the numbers on the cordless beside her, wondering if maybe she should call the police. But then she remembered from her escapades with Liza what life was like once you got the cops involved. Once they were in your fucking business, they never got out. Never. Instead, she tried Todd’s cell again. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ she barked when her husband told her to leave a message at the tone and he would get back to her as soon as he was able.

      As soon as I’ve dismounted my invisible receptionist with the great boob job whose name is not Michelle, I’ll be sure to call you back. Beeeeeep.

      She probably slept over that new friend’s house, Debbie told herself. What was her name? The one Lainey went to the movies with? Carly? Karen? That was probably it. Maybe she’d even told her she was gonna be sleeping over. It was so crazy this morning, trying to get them all out of the house and herself off to work, she probably just didn’t remember Elaine telling her, is all. And the reason she’s not answering her cell? That one’s easy. Because she never fucking charges it, that’s why. No surprise there.

      Debbie pulled Claude from Rosey’s mouth and wiped the dog spit off on the cuff of her robe. She finished off the last of her beer with a single swallow and cracked open another from the portable cooler next to the couch. Then she turned up the volume on the TV, absently rocking the mangy teddy in her arms just as Conan O’Brien started his monologue and the clock began to count down yet another half-hour of her life.

      This

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